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Excerpt 1 from "Program or Be Programmed" by Douglas Rushkoff

 We are delighted to offer the audiobook version of Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff on BetterListen!  Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, says that we should “Read this book [Program or Be Programmed] before and after you Tweet, Facebook, email, or YouTube.”  We agree.  Following is a transcribed excerpt from this fascinating book, read by Rushkoff himself.

When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak.  When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. As we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them. In the emerging highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It’s really that simple. Program or be programmed. Choose the former and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter and it could be the last real choice you get to make.

Excerpt 1 from A Talk Based on "Life Inc" by Douglas Rushkoff

Check out this fascinating excerpt from a talk by Douglas Rushkoff based on his book Life Inc.: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How We Can Take it Back -- a book that challenges us to think completely differently about how we see the economics, the world of business, and money itself. 

As I see it, nothing is free. Nothing is free. Everything costs. It’s just that many things are not paid for. So there is a very big difference between those two things. I think that the problem is that the operating system for money, the operating system that we use for money, is obsolete and it is incompatible with the digital era. Our money system is a legacy system and like any legacy systems, they work for a certain amount of time. You forget that it’s even a legacy and then you begin to accept the operating system as a given circumstance.

Excerpt 1 from A Talk Based on "Program or Be Programmed" by Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff is widely considered to be one of most cutting-edge thinkers of our time.  In his book, Program or Be Programmed, Rushkoff asks the question: Do we direct technology or do we let ourselves be directed by it and those who have mastered it?  BetterListen! is delighted to make a available a talk Rushkoff gave on his fascinating new book.  Following is a transcribed excerpt from that talk which challenges us to think differently about the world around us.

What I see when I look at the history of culture and technology and computing, and media in particular, is I see occasional rare opportunities for civilization, the majority of people, to decide to participate in what’s going on. For people to actually become what in the sixties we used to call empowerment. For people to actually become empowered to exercise agency in their own affairs and in the world around them.

Excerpt 3 from "Men & Women: Talking Together" with Deborah Tannen and Robert Bly

In this insightful transcribed excerpt from "Men & Women: Talking Together", men's movement pioneer reflects on Deborah Tannen's classic book on male/female communication -- You Just Don't Understand -- and how Tannen's observations play out in his own marriage.

Let’s go on a bit and I just want to say a few more words about her book. The first time I came in contact with her, my wife and I were having dinner up in northern Minnesota and someone started to read out of the book. We both fell off our chairs laughing because of every mistake we had made including every misunderstanding, and I remember the first one that was said was this one: The woman says to the man, “Would you like to stop for a drink before we get home?” I think she is asking for information.

Wisdom 2.0 Conference Recap

Generation Wired…and Wise?

by Matthew Gilbert

Wisdom and technology had their friendly faceoff at the second annual Wisdom 2.0 conference as some of Silicon Valley’s finest mixed comfortably with a trio of mindfulness masters and an audience of new media pioneers. And if those in the sold-out crowd (or among the 130,000 who watched the streamed version) had any question of what they were in for, Zynga co-founder Eric Schiermeyer quickly reminded them: “In order to succeed in business, forget an MBA. Learn how to be mindful.”

The theme of mindfulness weaved its way throughout the conference, in no small part because of the presence of Jon Kabat-Zinn, renowned scientist-author and founding director of the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts. His wry and sometimes solemn mien gave the event some necessary gravitas, assisted by Zen Abbot Joan Halifax (who attended the 2010 conference) and popular Buddhist meditation teacher Jack Kornfield. The juxtaposition of their collective wisdom against the relatively nascent spiritual impulses of the other speakers provided some helpful perspective – not to take anything away from anyone on stage or in attendance. Everyone seemed passionately immersed in their own journey of exploring how to wisely co-exist with an explosion of technological tools that are re-defining what it means to be connected – and, in some cases, to be human.

Great article about the groundbreaking Wisdom 2.0 conference.

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Excerpt from "The Toxic Mind" by Armand DiMele

 

 

In "The Toxic Mind", host of “The Positive Mind” radio show and founder of the DiMele Center for Psychotherapy, Armand DiMele,  along with special guest Roberta Maria Atti, talks about the side effects of suppressing feelings like anger and frustration, and discuss ways to prevent the side effects from suppressing emotions and how to heal them.  Following is an excerpt from this important program.

 

 

 

Hey listen -- here’s something for you to consider. Consider this: the continual suppression of emotions during fight or flight reactions results in atrophy, an endogenous toxicosis in noradrenic neurons. How do you like them apples? That’s what our program is going to be about today. Today we’re going to be talking about this and that sounds pretty technical, doesn’t it? Well, Roberta and I have uncovered The Biology of Mental Illness and Violence, and it’s really remarkable, by E. Van Winkle. And by the way, this work is available in 23 languages. It’s called “The Toxic Mind”. E. Van Winkle just woke up to write this article. 

Let’s start with the theory, the idea here, the following hypothesis, right? The continued suppression of emotions means you feel something and you don’t let yourself manifest it. It comes up, you feel it, and it gets shut off for one reason or another. During fight or flight reactions, now that means when you’re excited, nervous, or tense, when your body is saying we have to do something and we’re going to get all ready for action. So that’s the fight or flight reactions, that if you don’t do something when your body says we’re ready to do something about the situation, it results in a toxic accumulation. Now that’s what we’re going to look at today. 

This is a really interesting thing. How could that be? How does it work? Well, we know how it works because we see it all the time. Your leader at work is in a miserable mood and they bark at you, and you get upset but you can’t say anything about it. So it boils. Part of the suppression of emotions is actually what is the backbone of civilization.   We as civilized humans, we suppress emotions in part because it’s necessary in order to function in a human society.

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Armand DiMele bio and links

Excerpt 1 from "From Bindhu to Ojas" with Ram Dass

"From Bindhu to Ojas" are talks offered by reknowned teacher Ram Dass in 1969.  We are so delighted to have access to these talks and to be able to share them with you.  Following is a transcribed excerpt from these exciting talks.

Everything up to there describes the western culture and 99.9% or whatever absurd number of the people of the world never have energy available to them at any center higher than those three, except in just moments, rare moments.

Everybody’s got rare moments. It’s like for almost everybody, it’s all available in the first, second, and third chakra. So you meet somebody who is primarily a first chakra person and what you’re doing is you’re really helping them come into the second chakra. And when they are in the second you are helping them get into the third. You are helping a lustful being develop an ego. And that in a sense is what western religions have become about, the super ego, the super third chakra. 

According to the Freudian system, it treats one, the first chakra as id, as uncontrollable animal impulses, the second chakra as sexual desire, and the third chakra as super ego. That’s in that system. I’m just translating systems just for the fun of it, because many people think in these western systems and it is fun to make these translations of them. So Freud talked about religion being perverted sexual energy and the reverse side of that coin is that sexual energy is blocked religion. Pay your money and you pick your chakra. Pick your center that you want to be dominated by.